A number of new sports have leapt into the public consciousness through the Olympics as they do every four years.  But how can they sustain new found interest and become a breakthrough sport in the way for example that cricket has in Ireland in recent years?
The start of the Barclays Premier League season this weekend will dominate media coverage from Saturday to Monday. Sunday’s clash between Kilkenny and Tipperary in the All Ireland Hurling Championship will confirm the GAA as a main topic of ‘water cooler’ conversation, and the increased pace of pre season rugby completes the hat trick of the Big three sports flexing their muscles to recapture hearts and minds after a summer of boxing brilliance, athletics endeavour and surprise highlights from handball to triathlon, race walking to sailing.
Each of these sports has a dedicated following among existing supporters but the sweep of publicity for a wider audience comes like a lighthouse, only occasionally and then just briefly.
There has been talk throughout Britain in the post Olympic period of the need to revive mainstream media coverage of ‘minority’ sports.  Social media campaigns have sprung up to support the return of the BBC’s Grandstand programme which featured a wide diversity of sport between 1958 and 2007 before quietly being dropped.
The counter argument is that sport in the media has never been better served through digital channels and the internet.  To ramp up coverage through public service broadcasters like RTE would be injurious to the broad spectrum of discourse they need to cover as part of their remit.
So much is focused on the main TV Channels that the most important element of any sporting success, the narrative behind it, is often overlooked.
People did not tune into the performance of Tom Daley because of a desire to see people diving off a 10 metre high platform.  They did so because of his being in some shape of media spotlight for the past five years since his emergence at the age of 13 as an athlete of world standing.
The death of his father last year and his loss at the World Championship created a vulnerability which made him a compelling character.  Diving was merely the stage on which he played.
This week’s soccer international between the republic of Ireland and Serbia was a 0-0 draw on the pitch with little to commend it but it held the national interest because of the retirement of Shay Given and the furore surrounding a difference of opinion between Giovanni Trapattoni and Shane Long.  Like any great drama, sport is about the characters that play the games rather than the games themselves.
Irish Hockey runs a weekly promotion on twitter entitled ‘Get to know your internationals’.  It seeks guesses from its 3,000 followers on who the ‘mystery’ star is.  This week’s question was about the star that is studying to become a Formula 1 race car engineer and previously played Ladies Gaelic Football for Dublin.  The answer was Nicci Daly.  The importance is in giving us more information about the players than the squad number they are wearing.
Making sports stars human is the most important step that sports can take to attract new interest, new players, new commercial partners that want to enhance the ‘story’ of the sport, and a new found prominence in the public eye.
TV coverage of live games is important but it will come through building the characters and forcing the public to demand knowledge of where they can be seen whether live or on a screen or mobile device.
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